Network backup systems process vast amounts of data between computers and storage devices often in parallel streams of data. One of the biggest challenges for ingesting multiple data streams into a backup storage system is to distribute those streams across multiple network interfaces for good performance. Link aggregation is a computer networking technique for combining or aggregating multiple network connections in parallel in order to increase throughput beyond what a single connection can sustain, and to provide redundancy in case one of the links should fail. A link aggregation group combines a number of physical ports together to make a single high-bandwidth data path, providing load sharing of data traffic among ports and improving connection reliability. The Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) as defined in IEEE 802.3ad provides a method to control the bundling of several physical ports together to form a single logical channel. LACP, however, poses certain challenges. For example, it can be very difficult to install and maintain, it does not always deliver the full bandwidth of all interfaces, any changes require taking interfaces offline for configuration, and it is very sensitive to network errors. An additional disadvantage of LACP is that it is difficult to configure across multiple routers, for a WAN network.
Large scale enterprise networks employ complex backup management systems comprising server and manager computers to execute and manage data backup and restore operations. Much of the data is stored in databases. Database or data replication is the frequent copying of data from a database in one computer to a database in another computer so that all users share the same level of information. This creates shared or distributed database information that must be properly maintained to ensure consistency between the many resources in an enterprise network, and to improve reliability, fault tolerance, and accessibility. Network users (e.g., customers) need the ability to control the interfaces used for replication data, such as to direct the replication connection over a specific network and utilize multiple network interfaces with high bandwidth and reliability through fail-over. For high availability, multiple gateways are used across WAN networks with multiple IP addresses on both the source server and target server.
In a multi-tenant network system, there may be many tenants using storage on source and replicating to a destination server. Multi-tenancy allows many customers to share a storage-server, with each customer storing their data on a separate top level directory. Each tenant typically wants to have the replication go through their own network. The tenant also wants to have multiple paths through their network for higher performance and redundancy for recovery. Configuration of network parameters is often an very cumbersome process to enable features, such as LACP, load balancing and failover. For example, an administrator may need to do certain detailed configuration operations, such as add an entry in/etc/hosts file on source computer for the remote computer and hard code one of the private LAN network interfaces as the destination IP; add a route on source computer to the remote computer specifying a physical/virtual port as exit out of the source computer to the remote destination IP; and configure LACP through the network on all switches between the computers for load balancing and failover. This solution requires different applications to use different names for the remote target computer to avoid name conflicts in the/etc/hosts file.
What is needed, therefore, is a configuration process that allows Multiple tenants to easily configure a preferred network to keep their data local on their own network, and that requires no specific configuration on any network device.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Replicator, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of EMC Corporation.
Multi-Path distribution, load balancing and failover for interface groups is hereafter referred to as the ifgroup method.